Category: Data Center

In June 2017, we concluded the Building Next Generation Data Center online course with a roundtable discussion with Andrew Lerner, Research Vice President, Networking, and Simon Richard, Research Director, Data Center Networking @ Gartner.

During the first 45 minutes, we covered a lot of topics including:

There are two reasonable ways of building a layer-2 leaf-and-spine fabric: use VXLAN (the direction almost everyone in the industry is taking at the moment), or routing-on-layer-2 technology like TRILL or SPB.

We’re almost done with our data center infrastructure optimization journey. In this step, we’ll virtualize the network services.

Another question from someone watching my Designing Active-Active and Disaster Recovery Data Centers webinar (you know, the one where I tell people how to avoid the world-spanning-layer-2 madness):

In the video about parallel application stacks (swimlanes) you mentioned that one of the options for using the R/W database in Datacenter A if the user traffic landed in Datacenter B in which the replica of the database is read-only was to redirect the user browser with the purpose that the follow up HTTP POST land in Datacenter A.

Here’s the diagram he’s referring to:

Another part of my data center infrastructure optimization presentation is transcribed, edited and published: use distributed file system (at least for VM disk images).

During Shawn Zandi’s presentation describing large-scale leaf-and-spine fabrics I got into an interesting conversation with an attendee that claimed it might be simpler to replace parts of a large fabric with large chassis switches (largest boxes offered by multiple vendors support up to 576 40GE or even 100GE ports).

As always, you have to decide between implicit and explicit complexity.

One of my readers sent me a lengthy email describing his NSX-versus-ACI views. He started with [slightly reworded]:

What I want to do is to create customer templates to speed up deployment of application environments, as it takes too long at the moment to set up a new application environment.

That’s what we all want. How you get there is the interesting part.

The work of editing transcripts of my two switches presentation is (very slowly) moving forward. In the fourth part of the Optimize Your Data Center Infrastructure series I’m talking about reducing the number of uplinks.

Last week a large European financial institution had a bad hair day. My friend Christoph Jaggi asked for my opinion, and I decided not to focus on the specific problem (that’s what post-mortems are for) but to point out something that’s often forgotten: don’t believe your system won’t fail, be prepared to deal with the failure.

One of my readers was considering Dell/EMC hyperconverged solutions and sent me this question:

Just wondering if you have a chance to check out VxRail.

I read the data sheet and spec sheet, but have never seen anyone using it (any real-life experience highly welcome – please write a comment).